Across the street she could see the glimmer of a light summer dress in Lord Cranston’s apartment.  It moved restlessly backwards and forwards from one window to the other:  now it shone out in the balcony above the street:  now it retired into the darkness of the room.  Clarice gauged Lady Cranston’s impatience by her own, and experienced a fellow-feeling of sympathy.  ‘During this suspense,’ she thought, ’you and I ought to be together.’  As the thought flashed into her mind, her husband spoke to her.  She set a hand before her eyes and did not answer him.  She realised that she had been thinking of herself as Drake’s wife.  On the instant every force within her seemed to concentrate and fuse into one passionate longing.  ‘If only that were true!’ She felt the longing throb through every vein:  she acknowledged it:  she expressed it clearly to herself.  If only that were true!  And then in a second the longing was displaced by an equally passionate regret.

‘It might have been,’ she thought.

Again her husband spoke to her.  She turned towards him almost fiercely, and saw that he was offering her a shawl.  She steadied her voice to decline it, and turned back again to the window.  But now as she looked across the street, she was filled with a new and very bitter envy.  The woman over there had the right to suffer for her suspense.

At last the clock doled out ten strokes with a grudging deliberation, and less than five minutes later the shadow of a man was seen upon one of the red blinds.  In the street below the people surged forward:  there was a running flash of white as their heads were thrown back and their faces upturned to the Hall; and the shouts and cries swelled to a Babel, tearing the air.  The blind was withdrawn, the window thrown open:  Clarice could see people pressing forward in the room.  They looked in the glare of yellow light like black ninepins.  A gleam of bright scarlet shot out from amongst them, and the Mayor stepped on to the balcony above the archway.  The tumult died rapidly to absolute silence, a silence deeper than the silence of desolate places, because one saw the crowd and one’s ears were still tingling with the echo of its shouts.  It was as though all sound, all motion had been arrested by some enchantment, and in the midst of that silence one word was launched down the street.

‘Drake!’

The announcement of the numbers was lost in the sudden renewal of conflicting shouts.  Clarice made no effort to ascertain them.  That one word ‘Drake’ filled the world for her.  The very noise in the street came to her ears with a dull muffled sound as though it had travelled across a wide space, and it seemed no more than an undertone to the ringing name.